Millionaire Boss. Peggy Moreland
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“If I knew who he was,” he growled, “I wouldn’t be sitting here listening to you yap. I’d be hauling his butt to jail.”
Resenting his contemptuous reply to what she considered a simple and justifiable question, Penny flounced around in her seat and slapped her arms across her chest. “Well, excuse me. It isn’t as if I’m aware of every detail of your life and business. I’ve only worked for your company a month, you know.”
Erik whipped his head around, prepared to lambast his secretary…but when he saw her face, his scathing retort dried up in his mouth.
Those were tears in her eyes, he realized, his stomach clenching at the sight of them. Big alligator-size tears that looked as if they might overflow her eyes and slide down her cheeks at any moment. A twinge of something close to guilt—an emotion Erik rarely indulged in—pricked at him and he tore his gaze from her.
Not your fault, he told himself as he shut down his laptop. She’s a mouse. A crybaby. Totally incapable of handling the stress her job entailed.
“Cry and you’re fired,” he warned as he shoved the laptop under his seat. “I won’t have a crybaby working for me.”
Penny turned her head again, this time away to face the opposite bank of windows, blinking furiously. “I’m not a crybaby.”
“Could’ve fooled me.”
She graced him with the coldest, most damning look she could muster under the circumstances. “I’m not a crybaby,” she repeated tersely. “But you, on the other hand, are undoubtedly the rudest, most self-possessed, most linguistically challenged man I’ve ever met.”
“Never said I wasn’t,” he replied easily, then frowned. “Linguistically challenged? What the hell is that supposed to mean?”
Jutting her chin, she smoothed the hem of her skirt over her knees. “My point exactly.”
His frown deepening, he shoved back his seat and closed his eyes. “You are, too, a crybaby,” he muttered, then held up a hand in warning, as if anticipating a comeback from her. “I’m going to sleep,” he informed her. “And I’d advise you to do the same. We’ve got a lot of work to do once we reach California.”
Moaning softly, Penny sat up straighter in her chair and pressed a hand to her lower back, arching against it as she tried to ease the dull ache there. After more than six hours sitting before a monitor, entering and tracking data for her employer, her eyes burned from the strain of staring at a glowing screen, and every muscle in her body screamed from sitting in the inappropriately designed chair.
Erik certainly hadn’t exaggerated when he’d warned her that they’d have a lot of work to do once they reached California, she thought wearily.
Sighing, she rose and crossed to the wet bar in the hotel’s penthouse suite in search of something to drink. “Would you like a soda?” she asked. “Or something to eat? We never got around to eating lunch,” she reminded him.
When he didn’t respond, she glanced his way. He sat slumped on the overstuffed sofa as he had all day, his cowboy boots propped on the coffee table, his laptop balanced on jean-clad thighs. His forehead looked like a freshly plowed field, the furrows that ran across it deep and wavy, a testament to the level and intensity of his concentration.
The man is a machine, she thought in disgust, a suspicion she’d formed before their trip to California, but now knew for a fact.
They’d arrived in California a little after ten the night before and were at their hotel by eleven, where she’d discovered to her dismay that he intended that they share a suite. She hadn’t had time to recover from the shock of that nerve-warping discovery before Erik had hustled her onto a glass elevator and to a penthouse on the hotel’s uppermost floor.
Once there she lost her ability to speak when confronted with the elaborately appointed and spacious suite—which, thankfully, she’d discovered consisted of a living area and two large bedrooms, each with its own private and luxurious bath. Erik hadn’t shared her starry-eyed fascination with the suite’s opulence and its ceiling-to-floor view of San Diego’s skyline, or her desire to explore. Instead he had immediately mumbled a curt good-night and gone straight to his room and to bed.
Disappointed, Penny had gone to her room, as well. But when she’d awakened that morning, she’d found herself alone in the suite—though, not for long. She’d barely had time to shower and don a fresh suit before Erik had returned, carrying a briefcase filled with a thick stack of reports. Without a word of greeting or explanation as to his whereabouts, he’d given her clipped orders to enter the data from the reports into a computer he’d set up for her on the suite’s only desk.
They’d worked silently and without a break ever since.
Sighing again, she chose a can of juice for her employer, poured it into a glass, then selected some fresh fruit, cheese and crackers from the basket on the bar and arranged them on a plate.
“Here,” she said, placing the snack on the coffee table beside his propped boots. “Eat.”
When he didn’t respond, she drew in a frustrated breath. “Mr. Thompson!”
He jumped, swore, then glared up at her. “What?”
“Food,” she said and pointed to the plate. “Now eat before you collapse from lack of nourishment.”
He scowled and turned his face back to the screen. “Not hungry.”
Wondering why life seemed to always link her with grumpy, sour-faced men who didn’t have the good sense to take care of themselves, Penny snatched the laptop computer from his thighs.
“Hey!” he cried, dropping his feet to the floor and sitting up. “What do you think you’re doing?”
“Taking care of you,” she replied, “just as Mrs. Hilloughby instructed me to do. Though I can see it will be a thankless job,” she added with more than a little resentment. She set the computer out of his reach, then pointed a finger at the plate. “Now eat,” she ordered.
Scowling, he snatched up the plate and fell back against the sofa. He stuffed a strawberry into his mouth and smashed it between his teeth. “Satisfied?” he asked, dashing a hand over his chin to catch a stream of juice that leaked from the corner of his mouth.
With a sniff, she turned for the bar to make a snack for herself. “Only when the plate is clean.”
Erik narrowed an eye at his secretary as she sank down onto a chair opposite the sofa, primly balancing her plate over pressed-together knees.
“What did you do before you came to work for me? No,” he said, holding up a hand before she could respond. “Let me guess. An army nurse? A nun in an all-girl school? A prison guard for a chain gang? A marine drill sergeant?”
She offered him a tight smile. “Funny. But, no, I was none of those things. After graduating from college, I was employed at a local bank, serving as the bank president’s secretary. I resigned about three years ago to work for my brother.”
“Doing what? Breaking kneecaps for him? Kicking puppies? Stealing old ladies’ canes?”
Though his suggestions were outrageous enough to be humorous, Penny refused to dignify his sarcasm with a smile. “My duties included housekeeping, cooking for a family of five and caring for my nieces and nephew.”
He bit a chunk off a wedge of cheese. “Why’d you leave?”
Uncomfortable with his close scrutiny, as well as his question, she lifted a shoulder. “My brother is a widower and depended on me too much, leaving the care of his children entirely up to me. If I’d stayed, he would have continued to ignore them.” She lifted a shoulder again. “So I left.”
“Bet your brother was plenty ticked at you for leaving him in a bind.”
She stiffened, reminded of Jase’s